What is Star Wars Commander, and should I play it?

Star Wars has been everywhere for months now. From BB-8 droids that you can bring home, to snagging that sweet soundtrack. That train of content isn't gonna slow down anytime soon, and you only have to take a look at the Play Store to know that. Stars Wars Commander is the newest addition to all of those games, and it's a base building game that will probably remind you of Clash of Clans as soon as you see it.

You'll play as a band of mercenaries who ally with either the rebellion or the dark side, and whichever side you choose will change what units you'll get access to during the game. You'll need to acquire resources, build a base, upgrading buildings and training troops as you go. There are also squads that you can join to play with others, and a campaign to complete.

Let's take a look at strategy in the Star Wars Universe

Your Base

Your base is the first thing you'll see when you start playing this game, and it's easily one of the most important parts. This is where you'll collect and store your resources, set up defense turrets, house and train your troops. Your base will start off pretty small, but as you play it will quickly grow as you play adding new and better buildings in the process.

Your base is where everything you have is stored, so you want to make sure that its properly defended. Tatooine is a pretty dangerous place after all, with criminals like Jabba running amok. Walls protecting your base will help to make sure that enemies can't just go running through willy nilly, and placing turrets will provide cover fire. Whether you are placing walls, buildings, or turrets you need to make sure that you're doing it smart. Having resource collection buildings outside of the range of turrets will only end in tragedy.

Your base is also where you will train and house your troops. You'll need them for the various missions that you go on once you've chosen to work for either the rebellion or the dark side. Initially you'll only have access to the base storm trooper, but as you level up your barracks you'll open up better units to fight for you.

When you decide to upgrade a building, you'll want to do so strategically. Each upgrade requires a droid to attend to it, and you can only upgrade if you have a droid free. You'll start out with two, and you can buy more down the road but they get pricier every time. Consider what you need access to first, and how long it will take to build before committing to a building upgrade.

Resources

Resources are an integral function in how this game works. You'll need certain amount of resources to ever upgrade your buildings, or construct new ones. Your main resources come in form of Alloy and Credits, but you'll also need to keep an eye on your supply of crystals as well as how many droids you employ.

Alloy and Credits are the soft currency of Star Wars Commander. To get them you just need to purchase and place the appropriate buildings. You can collect the resources as they're gathered up and a running tally is kept on the upper right of your screen. Allow and credits are primarily used for upgrading buildings, including the buildings that collect and store the resources themselves.

Crystals are the hard currency though, and you can purchase more for cold hard cash. Crystals are used to speed up troop training and building construction. You'll also use crystals to purchase more droids to make building your base up faster a possibility. You could consider droids a resource, but they are more like your workers. You can construct one building per droid at a time, so how fast you can build up is directly related to how many droids you are employing.

In-app purchases do play a part in Star Wars Commander, but only in that they exist. So far, we haven't encountered a situation where you would need them in order to keep up, or succeed in your gameplay. You won't find pop up ads asking you to constantly buy bundles, and it's only when you go into your crystals menu that it'll ask if you want to make purchases.

Playing the Game

Once you've gotten some troops trained up, and your base has gotten started, it's time to play the rest of the game. You'll find two basic modes of play; a campaign of story missions, and a versus mode where you can challenge rivals. This is where you're going to end up expending most of those troops that you've trained up as well.

Campaign missions are where you're going to find the story of this game, and it will differ quite a bit depending on which faction you decided to give your allegiance to. The first set of missions are basic tutorial missions, making sure that your base is properly set up and that you understand the different types of missions and what they entail. These include figuring out strategies for sending troops in, as well as constructing your base in a way that allow it to repel attackers.

In the Versus mode, you'll attack the bases of other players. Activating this mode too quickly will dissolve your initial peace shield so be careful. It's can also be quite challenging. You'll be attacking the base of a player from the opposite faction, and likewise you yourself can be attacked. When you attack, you're dealing with only the base defenses that are constructed, like turrets.

One thing that you'll notice quite quickly is that you need to strategically use your troops, along with any faction units you bring into a mission. Your faction may gift you with AT-ST's or give you access to a ship for flyover strafing. However you'll need to manually send your guys in, and once you have tapped on the screen things have gotten started. Additionally, you'll want to remember that all troops sent on missions are expended. They won't return to your roster, even if they survive a mission.

Should you Play it?

Star Wars commander is a fun, and easy to pick up base defense and attack game. It's nice and simple without tons of adds, and like the Disney owned Star Wars universe, it's as kid friendly as Clash of Clans is. With a minimum reminder about in-app purchases, Star Wars Commander tries to stay out of your way and just let you enjoy the game.

If you're a fan of this style of game, then we definitely recommend checking out Star Wars Commander. Fun, easy to pick up, and a great Star Wars themed game to check out.

Or I could play Baldur's gate... Or any of a few hundred games off of the Humble Bundle. Waking Mars, for example is a great game. Don't want to use a touch screen? There are these magical things called Bluetooth Game Controllers. If you don't like the button setup or the feel of the Vita or 3DS, you're stuck. Me? I found the perfect bluetooth game controller. It's small enough to easily pack, but very comfortable.

Oh, and I don't have to play Leapfrog with Sony to put custom software on my device. I was out on the PSP for that reason. I never got into the 3Ds because... reasons. Probably the fact that the games aren't noticeably better than on my android tablet and phone.

And the best part is that if I don't feel like lugging the controller along, I have a great gaming platform built into something I'm already going to carry.

I feel like this was a paid advertisement. This game reeks of IAP. The game is extremely repetitive and you will find yourself waiting hours and hours for base upgrades and units to be built.

If you want a good example of a star wars game with acceptable IAP I recommend galaxy of heroes. Collecting the characters is fun and you get a lot of game time before you are tapped out on a daily basis.

I honestly think that game devs who make you go away from their games (Or pay a fee to keep playing) are making a mistake. If I go away from this because it's going to be hours until X is built, then I'll likely forget about it. Less time on me playing = less exposure of the game = less opportunity for revenue. If they had an advertising scheme instead of pay to speed up (see Adventure Capitalist as a great example of fremium done right) or better yet, a fee to remove all the BS, they'd get played more often by me.

That's why I have an Android phone and a Windows tablet. I have Civ 4 on it, Red Alert, Gal Civ II, Don't Starve, and have had Star Wars Battlefront II (The old one) on it. Full Minecraft as well. All of these play great. (I use a bluetooth KB for Civ) and look great. I'd never have a windows phone, but the tablet makes for a lot of fun in a pretty small package. (Dell Venue 8 Pro 5000 64GB version with Windows 10)

I played it for awhile. It's a nearly straight copy of clash of clans, but the devil is in the differences. It's just not nearly as fun. The star wars universe cool factor wears off fairly quickly, and then you're left with a bad rip off.

Best example - good luck finding an active "clan" to join. The search feature is bad, and when you join random clans, you'll notice the players don't donate, and most are inactive. There are no "clan wars" to speak of. (Unless they updated the game in the past 6 months)

Clash of Clans gets everything right. If you want a game like this, let the star wars universe take a break and get a game that is much, much better.

Please, stop with the promoting of these awful pay to play games, they are the lowest common denominator when it comes to gaming, they put the lowest development budget into these simple games as they can and then simply add time sinks that can be bypassed with lots of money in excess of what an actual real game costs *cough*$99.99 IAP*cough*, these types of games shouldn't be promoted, they should be berated for being awful lazy programing games, they need to go away.